People don't buy Sparks and M5 Ultras to run a 27B model - you buy it to run an MoE model like Qwen Next which this M5 excelled at.
My technical-expert twin played around with these LLMs, for about an hour, and then correctly reasoned "it's able to be WRONG, faster."
This seems apt. My next LLM machine will be closer to 96gb+ vRAM.
...actually: get help.